Georgia Challenges Arizona To The All-Time Most Bigoted State Title

By now everybody nows what happened among the far right of the Arizona Republican Party over the last few days. The state legislature passed some crackpot anti-LGBT bill that lets anyone make up some religionist excuse for discrimination against gays-- or anyone else they don't like. They passed the same crap last session but Governor Brewer vetoed it. This time Senators Flake and McCain immediately called on Brewer to veto it again-- and so did the Arizona business community. And then several Republicans in the legislature said, basically, "Oops, we screwed up. Can we get a do-over? No? Then Governor, please save us from ourselves and veto this stupid bill." Even Romney and right-wing nuts like Newt Gingrich have come out against it. I hope you watched state Senator Steve Pierce (R-Prescott), a generally dependable extremist asshat and the Senate president, on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show Monday night. The clip is up top. He called his vote a "mistake and a miscalculation." I understand the mistake part but I wonder what the calculation was. Just the ability to inflict pain on a whole downtrodden class of people because they thought they could get away with it with impunity? That sounds like the philosophical foundation of today's entire Republican Party. "We had no idea there would be the fallout there has been," he admitted, with no sense of irony (or regret). Pierce sounds like he's certainly used to allowing outside groups to set his caucus' agenda. When Hayes asked him who concotted this legislation, he admitted it was written by the Center for Arizona Policy, a proto-fascist hate group trying to ditch democracy in favor of a theocracy.

Of course, Rush Limbaugh and his zombie cohorts on far right Hate Talk radio jumped right into the middle of the fray, insisting that Brewer was being "bullied" into vetoing it.

Limbaugh on Tuesday told his listeners that the media’s “soap storyline of the hour” is whether or not Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer will veto SB 1062, which the state’s legislature passed last week.

“Religious beliefs can’t be used to stop anything the left wants to impose, unless they’re Muslim religious beliefs and then we have to honor those. But any other religious beliefs are not permitted,” Limbaugh said. “The left will not allow them. Now, the current thinking is that Gov. Brewer will probably veto the bill, which, you might think on the face of it will make her a hero with the news media and the rest of the left.”

...“She’s being bullied by the homosexual lobby in Arizona and elsewhere,” he said. “She’s being bullied by the nationwide drive-by media, she’s being bullied by certain elements of corporate America in order to advance the gay agenda. I guess in that circumstance bullying is admirable. In fact, this kind of bullying is honorable.”

…TheBlaze’s Dana Loesch, who also hosts a daily radio show, told Politico that she doesn’t “think that the government has the right to command labor or free expression under any circumstances.”

“I completely support the right of a gay baker to refuse service to the Westboro cult on the basis of belief. It’s their right in what I presume to still be a free country. I completely support the right of black business owners to refuse business to the klan,” she said.

And, Loesch added, “I also personally like knowing what a business owner believes. For instance, when I see ‘no guns allowed on these premises’ in shop windows, I simply go somewhere else. The power of the dollar.”

“If it’s known that a business owner is racist, I’ll just go somewhere else. I like the choice of knowing. Apparently some don’t,” she said. “It’s a scary day when the government can force indentured servitude and blind commerce.”

…Arizona conservative radio host Jon Justice said that at this point, “more harm has been done now to the state, to Republicans, to those individuals that voted for it, than any good that may have come out of this law in the few instances where it may have provided some help to a business owner.”

“Is all of this backlash worth it? For me, personally, I don’t think that it is,” said Justice, whose radio show is based in Tucson, Ariz. “I hope Gov. Jan Brewer vetoes it.”

His conservative audience is leaning towards a veto as well, Justice said. It’s not because they disagree with what the bill was aiming to accomplish, “but that they either feel that those that crafted the bill went about it the wrong way or that it was just unnecessary,” he noted.

“If you’re looking at the issue of trying to protect the business owner, it seems like everybody agrees they want to see some level of protection for those business owners’ religious freedom. But it seems to be very specific to certain businesses that would have an issue with it. I mean, we keep going back to a bakery, a photographer-- there doesn’t seem to be a huge, larger issue about it,” he said. “They don’t think this is the correct way to do it because it can be so easily fit into a narrative of being hateful.”

All in all, he said, “the heart of the matter is they were trying to do the right thing, but unfortunately, it fit into a narrative of how people could go and abuse it, even though I don’t think people would have done this because it would have been poor business.”

The controversy around the measure has definitely been “overblown,” but at the same time, the bill was never necessary, Justice said.

“Unfortunately, Republicans have somewhat shot themselves in the foot and dug their heels in on an issue that they really didn’t need to be digging their heels in on,” he said. “The timing of this whole thing is just atrocious.”

Shooting? Even in one's own foot-- and that brings the Georgia Republican Party front and center. Just as Arizona Republicans were deciding they had no stomach for this fight and were busy wiping the crap off their shoes, along comes the wing nuts who control the Georgia House of Representatives, a chamber filled with crackpots, bigots and sociopaths-- and not all of them Republicans.

A bill moving swiftly through the Georgia House of Representatives would allow business owners who believe homosexuality is a sin to openly discriminate against gay Americans by denying them employment or banning them from restaurants and hotels.

The proposal, dubbed the Preservation of Religious Freedom Act, would allow any individual or for-profit company to ignore Georgia laws—including anti-discrimination and civil rights laws—that "indirectly constrain" exercise of religion. Atlanta, for example, prohibits discrimination against LGBT residents seeking housing, employment, and public accommodations. But the state bill could trump Atlanta's protections.

The Georgia bill, which was introduced last week and was scheduled to be heard in subcommittee Monday afternoon, was sponsored by six state representatives (some of them Democrats). A similar bill has been introduced in the state Senate.

…Legal experts, including Eunice Rho, advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU, warn that Georgia and Arizona's religious-freedom bills are so sweeping that they open the door for discrimination against not only gay people, but other groups as well. The New Republic noted that under the Arizona bill, "a restaurateur could deny service to an out-of-wedlock mother, a cop could refuse to intervene in a domestic dispute if his religion allows for husbands beating their wives, and a hotel chain could refuse to rent rooms to Jews, Hindus, or Muslims."

"The government should not allow individuals or corporations to use religion as an excuse to discriminate [or] to deny other access to basic healthcare and safety precautions," Maggie Garrett, legislative director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, wrote in a letter to a Georgia House Judiciary subcommittee on Sunday.

…"The bill was filed and is being pushed solely because that's what all the cool conservative kids are doing, and because it sends a message of defiance to those who believe that gay Americans ought to be treated the same as everybody else," writes Jay Bookman, a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Passing it would seriously stain the reputation of Georgia and the Georgia Legislature."